t was 8pm on a Sunday when Dawn and I took our young refugee friend to the hospital emergency room. He was not in danger of his life, but he was in pain and we judged he could be much worse if we waited until Monday. He did not have a local doctor: fortunately he’d not needed one since he’d been in Australia. On a Sunday night the emergency room seemed to be the place to go.
We breathed a sigh of relief when we saw only a handful of people in the waiting room. That sigh became one of agony when we saw on the triage desk a sign, Current waiting time for non-urgent patients – 7 hours.